intimacy with demons

Humans are endowed with
the stupidity of horses and cattle.
Poetry was originally a work out of hell.
Self-pride, false pride,
suffering from the passions,
We must sigh for those taking this path
to intimacy with demons.

Ikkyu, in
Beneath a Single Moon: Legacies of Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry

droonkher tashi delek, konchog!

Today is the 9th birthday I have celebrated with my friend, goad, wife and consort, Allie Goin. She still cares to mark hers, while I prefer to let mine pass, leaving no trace- but then I have marked many more than she has. Her enjoyment of these rituals marks me as well, one of my few capitulations to sentiment and making memories on purpose.

There is little we haven't faced, endured, prevailed and blessed together. Every new celebration presses an unsentimental finger on the wound intrinsic to every genuine shared life - that it is all gift, that its days are sweet and numbered, that only fidelity in time makes it possible to see something grow, all the while releasing as much as we can, owning neither each other, these observances, or their small comforts.

Allie has given me many such gifts, is a ballast to the hard measure I take of our species and our lot, coming into my life several months into my recovery from cancer and the nearly equal harsh cards cancer treatment deals you. She is faithful without that quality's frequently attendant idiocy, owns a fearless and curious spirit that sometimes lands her in hot water, and has become, in our 9 shared years, nobody's fool.

I am fortunate to know her, and generally fail to say so enough. If you meet or have met such a partner, you know how this marks you, and what it requires of you. I wish her every good thing- a swift path to enlightenment, the name for living free in this blasted world, and thank her from the depths for our good life together. I will never know another such as she, one of the few things I am confident about.

low end theory

Anyone seeking engulfment in the throb and thrum of the low- end frequencies- and sometimes nothing else will do- look no further than Roto Vildblomma, released in May 2010 on Dimitris Kariofilis' Antifrost label. Kariofilis, a.k.a., ILIOS, meshes his oscillators with the seething drawn strings of cellist Nikos Veliotis and contrabassist Costantino Kinakos, a.k.a., Coti K.

Following the brief, anthemic first track, we are immersed in tremors and troubled waters that push the air [and your innards] around, unrelieved save for a motoric development on the fourth track, an acceleration, as oxymoronic as that sounds, of Mohammad's pervasive gravitas.

Celllist Veliotis has become, in my recent, overlapping listening spheres, a somewhat ubiquitous presence. He brings the swot and strum of his cello to another trio offering this year, the stellar Copper Fields. He is half of the excellent duo Texturizer, with Coti K, whose two releases on Antifrost are well worth searching for. He is part of the imminent Looper release, with saxophonist Martin Kuchen and percussionist Ingar Zach, yet another trio that investigates long-form throb and shimmer. And on Roto Vildblomma, he is one third of the grounding gestalt field this trio achieves, with only occasional glimpses of the discrete parts of the instrumental whole. Veliotis has gradually developed his approach with the BACHbow, the creation of a fellow cellist that extends the arco possibilities, enabling him to draw across as many strings as he wishes.











Mohammad create a nearly seamless garment, satisfyingly replete with the frayed, loose ends such harmonically close, pitch-based drone works reveal. Another reviewer referenced the "religious" aura of their sound; while I think I hear what he was referring to, I would suggest a different coloration- ceremonial. For what rite this sort of low-end strum might be created, who knows? I do know the two individuals I have heard from who have caught Mohammad's sound in live performance report the experience is overwhelmingly powerful. Mohammad have dedicated their collective efforts to the subtle striations of the low-end strings, and Roto Vildblomma is, for me, without a dull or stray moment.

It is fantastic to hear some of the new music coming from Greece and, to date, when any of the members of Mohammad are involved, there is reason to anticipate it with high expectations.


Antifrost

Photos: Antifrost

You have got the impression that contemporary physics is based on concepts somewhat analogous to the smile of the absent cat. Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.

~Albert Einstein

i sing the body electric

A brief pointer to a duo sometimes assigned the unfortunate genre descriptor sinecore, the Stasis Duo. They indeed explore sine tones, both steady state and unstable, often painfully so. They also rattle, crackle, spit, bend and spark like a well-tended digital fire-pit. Their 2010 release on L'Innomable, straight out of Slovenia, follows several others scattered across the past decade.

The Stasis Duo is Matthew Earle and Adam Sussmann, employing guitar and electronics, drawing their electric bath from empty samplers and radically reduced guitar pitches, distilling their 36 minute shuffle and boil down gradually to vapors, then nothing. You can be forgiven, if you listen to the duo's shaped electricity at anything less than high volume, for thinking they have disappeared well before they do. The first track opens with a neck-snapping call to attention, moves through a stretch of sine taffy and extreme pitch pushing, before beginning the long reduction of elements, the clarification of the smallest crackles and hisses. Demanding close attention, high tolerance for the upper reaches of the sine, and an appreciation for the duo's focus on often indeterminate, near inaudible sound selections, they are working a distinct area of improvised electricity, more severely self-limited than anyone save perhaps Sachiko M.











The Stasis Duo may maintain a low flame much of the time, but their sound is immediate, physical and visceral. They uncoil their bent pitches in your cochlea, not by dint of volume, but by years of perverse study in the margins and membranes between audio pain and pleasure; they are, as Whitman sang of the body electric, cunning in tendon and nerve. On this L'Inommable release, you can cock your ear toward the duo's intuition and reflexes in order to appreciate their spare sound world. Equally, attune yourself to the level of technique involved in tossing off harmony, melody, rhythm and comfort itself, in order to shape raw electricity with a shared direction and flow. Stasis Duo's music is that elemental, by its nature uninviting, and accessible only to the acute listener. This last summing up is in no wise intended pejoratively- some music is that uncompromising and unconcerned with giving equal measures creature comforts with its other pleasures.

If you can locate copies of Sussmann and Earle's 2003 collaboration with Will Guthrie, Bridges, or Sussmann's solo guitar works released on the Document imprint, by all means do so.

They end their flight
one by one--
crows at dusk
~ Buson

i have so much to tell you

We haven’t seen each other for so long, I have so much to tell you.
~ Aung San Suu Kyi to her supporters, upon release today from 15 years of imprisonment.

reel back

The glut and surfeit of the sorts of new music I am interested in writing about is ridiculous. My resolve to focus primarily on releases from the current year flickers and wavers, as I am continually revisiting, or coming for the first time, to music from the past several years that merits a word or two.

I surrender weekly to the tug away from simply spending time with the newest releases. I am going to surrender as well to the pleasure in this, and let go of the pressure I apply to myself to somehow manage a brisker pace, fewer listens, shorter pieces. I didn't launch a blog to knuckle under to the petty tyrannical voices that drive us through academia, wage-slavery and whatever other real and hallucinated demands we chafe under.

















So if you revisit here, you can expect to see me reel back to works lost in the overwhelming tide of small imprint, limited edition, heard thrice and seldom reviewed, shelved and vaguely valued releases [ the DNA of EAI] the indefatigable duo of Pinnell and Olewnick may or may not have alerted you to. The Wire, among other like sources of consumer news, can keep one current with 250 word avant-bytes, essentially Tweets about the hemorrhage of CDRs, cassettes and Lossless downloads available for the junkie's futile satiety. I am going it slow, listening longer, and reminding myself what music is for me- that's finally ineffable, but as Katagiri Roshi said, you have to say something- and why I write here- to try and turn a little light on in the room I am listening in.










The remaining point I wish to make concerns length and scope- I am increasingly drawn to considering several works/projects in a piece of writing, and with many improvisers the collaborations and configurations they are involved with necessitates stretching out, and, of course, more time in discovery and immersion.












Katagiri Roshi had a knack for growing magnificent orchids that surprised some of his students. For something to flourish, he said to one such astonished student, you must give it care and attention for a long time. If I am unable to do that here, I would as soon let the words go into the aether, more time for listening. I did that with my blog zero some years back.

We gain nothing, from where I sit, by glut, whether it is in copious releases, conspicuous consumption, or prolix writing. I hope my remaining time with crow acquaints or reacquaints you with some good music, turns a little light on.
















The photos are of musicians I hope to write about soon enough.

at play in the fields of the lord

2010 has been a fertile and fecund year for Columbus, Ohio musician and droll Tweeter Mike Shiflet. In each new season, beginning in the spring with a vinyl release entitled Omnivores, Shiflet has delivered a new statement of where he is at in his now 13 year trajectory of soldering together pulse-waves, audio saturation, improbably dense clouds of hiss and spit, and, lately, shimmering and fragile melodic material.

Shiflet entered the summer with 070325/080409, another vinyl document, a split release capturing a 2007 live performance by Keith Fullerton Whitman, and a 2009 sketch for guitars and oscillators from Shiflet. One begins to hear Shiflet weighing and balancing the dualities rife in most of his work-analog and digital sources, serenity and placidity with agitation and the roiling maelstrom, the detailed shaping of massed sounds with a growing attention to each grain's shape and weight- and, to these ears, an organic development toward the autumn release of Llanos, a stunning realization and resolution of these seemingly contradictory elements.














Shiflet has been drilling down into the possibilities of noise since 1997, starting with sculpting feedback and mixer squall, eventually launching the noise/drone imprint Gameboy, issuing a ridiculous spate of music, his own and that of kindred spirits [100 releases in 10 years, a fearful symmetry]. Coincidental to my thinking about writing about Shiflet this week, I received a package from Bryan Eubanks, whose ambitious 3-disc drone document, Desired Climate Works, 2006-2007 was the swan song edition of Shiflet's label. Shiflet returned from a year in the Hyogo prefecture of Japan in the autumn of 2007, closed down Gameboy, and embarked on what sounds to me, in a survey of the 15 or so releases I have from him, a reconsideration of the elements pervading his work- the aforementioned dualities of face-pasting walls of noise, and the shimmer and gleam that emerges from the eye of the storm.

The noise and the music have made peace.

You can hear this balancing of sonic spit and implacable serenity on Omnivores, an album lovingly designed by the young, wacky visual artist John Malta. One side, entitled Omnivores, roils and scalds with the intensity and volume familiar from many Shiflet releases. The flip side, Scene Destroyer, boils down to a baseline of rumbles and chirps one feels on their skin following an electrical storm in a Midwest summer.

080409, Shiflet's side-long slab of guitar and oscillator pulses from a 2009 gig, was paired with Whitman's short ride in a fast machine, 070325, by Amethyst Sunset label head William Berry. On 080409, Shiflet morphs from pleasantly unstable rumbles and cresting waves of detritus, into guitar-driven ring modulations that build to a shrieking, Goblins-esque soundtrack for an imaginary horror film.

Both sides [Whitman's deserves further elaboration, away from the focus here on Shiflet's work] bring to mind how much the music I hear these days involving the analog synth is loaded with either homage to or an attempt at innovation or escape from the long shadow of Eliane Radigue. There are homages aplenty to every wave, sawtooth, square and sine, to be found in Shiflet's generation of analog wranglers. I hear this reckoning with Radigue’s colossal presence and the felt force of her compositions, in the explorations of Justin Meyers, Eleh, Whitman and Shiflet, as well as many others. Radigue looms over this area of striated analog droneage like Coltrane over the successive generations left to deal with both the storied sheets of sound of Giant Steps and the stratospheric leaps and freak tones of Coltrane's final few years.

It was in the extremely limited-release 3" from 2009, Supreme Trading, that I caught a glimpse of the unabashed regard for a lovely melody that, prior to this period, had to be content to peek through the squall and din of Shiflet's delusions of the fury. Recorded in 2008, easily passing off the radar with only 70 copies printed, a one-off of a 2008 gig, Supreme Trading finds Shiflet dropping through the familiar building noise into a jaw-dropping melody, the rare emergence of duende in his vocabulary.

The most beautiful thing in the world.

Just released on his own Editions Shiflet, Llanos ties together the coruscating tone work, scattered across Shiflet's contributions to over 60 releases, with the excess audio of early furnace blasts like Xenakis Youth and Last of the American Sessions.
Llanos [originally referring to the grasslands and fields of Colombia and Venezuela] is [bear with me, I will sharply digress here, but only for a moment] itself a response to a field; this is not Shiflet's first meditation on a specific field and the specific consciousness tied to the memory of that field. Shiflet articulated the first field encounter in 2003 in a brief essay, the second in the music of Llanos.

In 2003, Shiflet published a reminiscence of what Erikson called peak experience, what zen calls satori, in [of all places] Stylus magazine. In Cuyahoga park, eight years ago, Shiflet encountered a field populated with many deer while listening to Fennesz's Made In Hong Kong. The sight of the deer at play, the sounds of Fennesz, and the joy that surged through me that moment, clarified something for Shiflet. I was literally motionless, going on to say My life will probably never again be so perfectly soundtracked.

Now we come to Llanos, another encounter with another field. Again, in the accompanying notes to the CD, Shiflet writes about coming into a space, this one a stand of pines in the late summer, and experiencing something that necessitates making the music of Llanos. The album, he writes, is a futile effort to recreate a perfect moment in a perfect world.

It is significant to me that nearly eight years ago Shiflet's perfect soundtrack issued from another, admired musician, while this year he has created his own. Llanos encompasses, as I have said, much of the musical territory preceding it, but in a markedly unitive and mature way. There is no separation, to these ears, between howling noise and gorgeous melody, between the nearly overwhelming force and forbearance of the sun, and the rising wisps of steam and fog of late summer. Something indelible and illuminating occurred in that field, and Llanos is Shiflet's best effort to convey, in his developing vocabulary, the sound of the pine shadows and the setting sun's light on the back of the eyelids.

Shiflet's fealty to the elements of noise is all the more striking, given the tendency of artists who report similar peak experiences toward overtly precious, treacly music. He is so within himself on Llanos he can't fail. However futile or flawed Shiflet estimates his music to be in recreating the fields of a perfect world, it is exciting to hear him reach for that kind of work, that fusion of memory, specificity, and play. The music and noise have made peace.


Editons Shiflet

Photos: buddha in a field [Shiflet]; Shiflet [Ian Fraser]

All quotes in italics, Mike Shiflet, sourced from Stylus magazine and Editions Shiflet:

• The noise and the music have made peace, from Shiflet's 2003 reflection in Stylus on Fennesz and the field of deer.

• The most beautiful thing in the world was Shiflet's signature for years on a music discussion board.

At Play In The Fields of the Lord is the title of a novel by Peter Matthiessen

Inside people fear the outide; outside, the in.
But then I'm always halfway in or out the door,
most comfortable and at home in this fear,
knowing that falling is best for my nature.
Backwards works well, or gathered for the leeward
pitch, imitate the sea in perfect balance in her
torment.

~ Jim Harrison, After Ikkyu and Other Poems